Friendships are so important for the human experience and for our motherhood experience. Someone to share the load with, someone who sees you and gets what you are through, and someone who connects with you on different levels from your partner and your family. And even though these friendships are so important, they seem harder in this season of life.
In this week’s episode of the You, The Mother Podcast, I welcomed Danielle Bayard Jackson to discuss female friendships, how they evolve in adulthood and parenthood, and how to navigate these changes. Danielle is a female friendship coach and educator who speaks nationally on the subject of friendship as a wellness imperative. Her coaching business, Friend Forward, is dedicated to teaching women how to create and maintain better female friendships. Danielle talks all things friendship over on her Instagram @daniellebayardjackson and on her podcast Friend Forward.
How are Female Friendships Different from Male Friendships?
Generally, we’re all looking for the same things on friendship. We want to be heard, we want to be supportive, we want to have a good time. The difference between female friendships and male friendships is we prioritize the traits we’re looking for differently. For example, women tend to prioritize emotional support. It’s the number one thing that we look for in our same sex friendships. Men are not. In a 2021 survey it was shown that women tend to lean on their partner and their friends when they’re distressed while men tend to go to their family members and their partner. Men are not going to their friends. This creates a whole host of other issues for women as we are taking on the emotional labor for ourselves, our partners, and our female friendships.
Women tend to be more dyadic in our relationships, meaning one to one. Therefore, they’re more intimate, more intense. While men, tend to look for a group.
Research shows that female friendships tend to be more fragile in terms of conflict. These relationships are deeper, but we tend to have less tolerance for what we perceive as a violation. Men aren’t really having conversations about, should I dump this friend or not? It’s just whatever.
Female friendship and male friendship differences show up in a lot of different ways, and there are pros and cons to that.
Why do Friendships Become Harder in Adulthood?
Female friendships can be tricky for the beginning, and I think we can all think back to some incident in high school where our female friendships were hard to navigate, but then we become adults and this problem does not really seem to resolve itself.
Add on some transitions in life like marriage, careers, moves, and parenthood, and friendships can feel like they really get put on the back burner.
When we get stuck in the loss of identity, I miss my old life loops it can be easy to slip into the thinking that friendships were so much easier when we were in school. We tend to romanticize these before parenthood times in a lot of areas.
And it probably was easier back then when we saw each other all the time. We never had to figure out how to spend time together. School and other activities we were involved in acted as our social organizer.
Now, in this season of life, we have to coordinate those moment ourselves. If you want time with your friends you have to manufacture those opportunities for yourself. But that tends to be incongruent with our idea that friendship should be easy.
A lot of us are hung up between those two spaces because we’re trying to reconcile reality with our romanticized notion of what friendship should be. So, if in your mind you’re thinking, “Ah, it should just be easier than this, it should be organic,” and then you’re realizing, “oh gosh, it is hard to find time to get together,” you might find yourself disappointed and table the topic for now.
You have to find time. It’s hard. As an adult you have a lot of obligations that compete with that time, but finding time is number one.
Another mindset adults often say that makes it difficult is the belief that you should have already had friends by now. “Everybody already has their friend group. It’s too late for me. I’m 30 something.” That’s just not true. It’s not true. And as soon as you believe it’s too late, you just signed yourself up for what, 40 more years of no friends. That’s lonely.
Why Does It Feel Like Everyone Has Mom Friends but Me?
Maybe you entered motherhood before your other female friends, maybe you moved away from friends and haven’t made new friends prior to starting your family, or maybe you just don’t feel like you have found your group yet. You are not alone. It can be easy to get caught up in the comparison trap looking around at groups of women at your children’s school events or people you know on social media.
It’s hard not to look at your current situation and not try to use that to predict what life will be like. It is important not to speak in absolutes on topics like this. “I’m never going to have a group of friends.” “I’m always going to be left out.” These can be dangerous mindsets to get stuck in.
We look around and see these large groups of women, and there are women that love a large group. However, it is not everyone’s cup of tea and it’s not going to be the case for everyone. We already talked about how women tend to prioritize intimate friendships which mostly happen in a one-on-one interaction. Even in the large groups, research shows that women’s friendships do tend to splinter off that even if we’re in a big group, we have our subgroups.
When you start prioritizing one or two friendships it gets easier logistically and with the time piece.
Types of Loneliness:
- Intimate Loneliness: which means you want to be known very intimately. This can be satisfied by a best friend or a spouse.
- Relational Loneliness: which means you want to have relationships. You want some friends.
- Collective Loneliness: which means you long to have a shared identity. This is why a lot of us are longing for the group of friends. We want to feel like we are part of something bigger than yourself. If you have friends right now, but still feel like you’re dissatisfied, I encourage you to look at ways you can be a part of groups or organizations that make you feel that, and that validate your identity.
Want to be part of a group, but don’t know where to look?
- Local mom groups: Google local mom groups. Check through your local community center, library, park, church, etc.
- Join or start a book club.
- Join organizations at your child’s school.
- Join a runner’s group.
- Look for online groups that meet over zoom.
What are some barriers to friendships?
One is our idea of friendship in the first place. If we’re getting real with ourselves, some of us are looking for a good time. We still see friendship as it’s fun. It’s like a recreation. And yes, it should be a good time. However, it is work. A lot of us have friends, but they kind of feel like superficial because you’ve reserved it as a good time. We don’t take our burdens to a good time. We don’t ask our good time for help. We don’t introduce challenging topics into the conversation with our good time. We have to really look at what we really think of friendship that might explain why it’s difficult to create friendships.
Time is a huge barrier to our friendships in motherhood. We are overcome this time dilemma by creating routines with our friends. It can feel unsexy, but we have routines with our homes, our children, etc. and this is kind of where we come to in adulthood. Creating a friendship ritual or routine takes out the mental labor of planning and organizing.
Make a plan like every Friday at 10am we’re going to hop on the phone for 20 minutes. That’s it. That goes to the second tip, which is include the duration whenever you suggest a hangout. Many times, we decline or don’t initiate time with our friend because we don’t have three hour to dedicate. Often times your friend is in the same boat. Schedule a quick coffee date or a quick catch up. Sometimes that’s all you need, to hear her voice, see her face, and what’s going on. Check in with your friends and see if you can you get a friendship ritual locked down! One that you don’t have to think about, that has a set duration, and finally gets you to rethink what spending time together looks like.
It’s about getting creative, and we can do that as moms, we do every day! So how can you leverage the skills you’re already flexing as a mom and use them for your friendships? Get creative. Get it on the calendar, and you can do this with women who, at the end of the day, all they want is to connect with you.
How do we make mom friends?
We are thrown into this motherhood journey, and I don’t think that there’s anything that prepares you for it. You can read all the books and people can give you advice or be real with you, but I don’t think that until you’re in it, you get it.
This makes having those relationships where you can say, “I’m overwhelmed with the mental load of motherhood, I feel overstimulated all the time, my husband’s driving me crazy because he doesn’t pick up the piles on the stairs,” extremely important. We need these relationships where somebody else is in it too. And while these relationships are so important, maybe you’re the first one in your friend group to have a baby, and it’s not that you don’t have friendships, but you need new ones too.
First, we have to find the confidence to put ourselves out there. We talked earlier about finding a group to join. It’s also important to note that you should attend the group a couple times. The first time you go might feel weird. Try going at least three times to really get a feel for the environment and the people. Make your desire for friendship known.
Start conversations with people at the group, the story time, the park, or places you frequent. Ask what others are doing around town, and leverage people’s intel. Are there people you know that are super connected? Reach out and let them know you are trying to get more connected. Ask if she knows if there are there any groups that she knows of? She’s either going to give you recommendations that are useful or she might surprise you with a plus one invitation.
When making friends we have to find a way to be satisfied first with just connection. That was a really good chat, I needed that to boost my mood today, and I can be satisfied with that today. Hopefully after enough times this connection blossoms into a friendship, but not going into it with huge expectations and being consistently disappointed is important.
Find a way to be satisfied with the beauty of a lot of different kinds of friendships, instead of being dissatisfied that they’re not all turning into best friendships.
There are ways to expedite a friendship as well. After that really great conversation at the group, follow up with her about something you were talking about. Maybe you both have a baby going through a sleep regression, send her a text and ask her how it’s going. Those kinds of things lead like this emotional impression, and they keep us going between the times we get to see each other.
How do we navigate female tendencies in female friendships?
Danielle shares a personal story in the episode about how when people hear she is a friendship coach they assume she has a history of great friends. “The truth is the drama we talk about. That was me, especially in high school. Yeah. You know, being exclusive with my friend group, and saying things behind somebody’s back when she’s not around. All of that. Now I have an understanding that because I was insecure, I didn’t think I had anything unique or worthy to offer. And so yes, I’m threatened by the new girl coming in our group. What if she takes my spot? What if she just all of that from being insecure? And I know some of us are still carrying that into adulthood and it manifests as excluding others and gossiping about them because you’re insecure about your position.”
If you find that there are friends in a group who are excluding others, or they talk about this one lady when she’s not around, there’s a way to correct it without looking self-righteous. For example, with the gossiping, it’s proven that the main topic of conversation among women is other people. Not in a negative way, but in a sociological way. When it turns explicitly negative and you notice that there is always drama, you can say little things that shut down the conversation and redirect the behavior.
Some important questions to ask yourself: How can you make it playful, but still are making your boundaries known with what you’re comfortable with? And how can you observe what other women are doing and would she be a good friend for you?
Female Friendships are layered and can be hard to navigate AND they are an amazing opportunity to feel connected and less alone in our lives and in our motherhood journeys.
Come find connection with Danielle Bayard Jackson over on her Instagram @daniellebayardjackson and check out her podcast Friend Forward!
Supporting You, The Mother,
Abbey Williams, MSW, LSW
